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Al-Maqasid: Nawawi’s Manual of Islam pdf download

AL-MAQASID: NAWAWI'S MANUAL OF ISLAM
  • Book Title:
 Al Maqasid Nawawis Manual Of Islam
  • Book Author:
imam al-Nawawi
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240
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Al-Maqasid: Nawawi’s Manual of Islam Book Sample

INTRODUCTION – al-Maqasid: Nawawi’s Manual of Islam

Praise to Allah Most High, who shows who1never He wills the path to eternal happiness, the sunna of His beloved prophet (Allah bless him and give him peace), to whom He gave the message for mankind:

“Say: ‘If you love Allah, then follow me; Allah will love you and forgive you your sins. Verily Allah is forgiving and compassionate”’ (Qur’an 3:31).

To follow the Prophet (Allah bless him and give him peace) was a simple matter for his Companions (Sahaba); they knew and loved him, and when he would tell them something, they said, “We hear and obey.” When he passed from this world, the Qur’anic imperative remained, and the Companions diligently preserved all that they had learned from him, both the Divine Book that Allah had sent with him, and his example, in word and deed.

Those who had taken knowledge from him during his lifetime passed it on to those after them, and so on down to our own times-and little wonder, for in their eyes, these were medicines that meant eternal life for whoever possessed them.

The Qur’ an, the first source of guidance, was memorized during the lifetime of the Prophet (Allah bless him and give him peace) by thousands of Companions in a deliberate and sustained educational effort centered around the mosque in Medina, whence teachers were sent to tribes in all parts of the Arabian Peninsula.

The hadiths, or eyewitness accounts of the Prophet’s words and deeds

The hadiths, or eyewitness accounts of the Prophet’s words and deeds, were transmitted in precisely the same way, first to contemporaries and then to subsequent gen­erations. Someone who has lived among the Arabs can attest to their phenomenal powers of memory, and it is not difficult to understand why, given their concern, the individually recorded reports from his life came to number over a hundred thousand.

Many of these were from various narrators describing the same events, but allowing for repetitions (which were carefully mem­orized and transmitted by hadith masters (huffadh)), and dis­counting spurious (mawdu ‘) accounts by later narrators (which were equally carefully preserved, so as not to be accepted), the substantive hadiths that reached the Muslims from the Prophet (Allah bless him and give him peace) numbered approximately thirty thousand.

The Muslim community responded to the magnitude of this knowledge and to the ethical imperative of living it on a daily basis with a wide range of scholarly disciplines that furnished the means to distill this vast tradition into a clear, practical answer to the question: What does Allah expect of one?

This then, is the basis of the study of Sacred Law or shari ‘a in Islam: we have been ordered to follow the Prophet (Allah bless him and give him peace), and he is no longer alive to personally teach us. All that has reached us of it has reached us through men.

And this is why Muslims from earliest times have relied on the most knowledgeable of these men to take their religion from-whether in hadith, tenets of faith ( ‘aqida), Qur’ anic exegesis (tafsir), or the other Islamic sciences. The foremost of them were termed Imams or “leaders,” in view of their position in each field, so their knowledge could be accepted and followed.

The four Imams of Sacred Law

For orthodox Musli1ns (Ahl al-Sunna wa al-Jama ‘a), there are four Imams of Sacred Law: Abu Hanifa, Malik, Shafi ‘i, and Ahmad. The rulings that they concur upon, about 75 percent of them, are a decisive proof for Sunni Muslims; while those they differ upon have been accepted by the Community for over a thousand years as a mercy from Allah.

Whoever examines the differences, moreover, finds that their roots invariably extend back to the prophetic Companions, from whom the Imams took their knowledge in an unbroken series of masters, the Com­panions in turn having been educated by the Prophet himself (Allah bless hjm and give him peace) such that it is unimaginable that their differences should be blameworthy.

Despite the preeminence of their rank, the Imams regarded themselves as explainers rather than legislators, and one of their greatest legacies was to the subsequent generations of scholars who followed in their footsteps, nearly a hundred in each school, scholars of the first rank who carefully rechecked the Imams’ work in light of the primary texts of the Qur’an and hadith.

The result was the traditional Islamic shari ‘a or Sacred Law embodied in the four schools of jurisprudence, which has won acceptance among Sunni Muslims down to our own day and become the unconquerable fortress of orthodox Islam (dis: 8. 1).  ((A11 cross-references in this work, whether to relevant discussions “(dis:),” to definitions “(def:),” or to the bibliographical or other sections, use section numbers(8.1). These sections are easilylocatedusing the numbers at the top corner of each page of Lhe text.))

More This Book  author al-Nawawi

The author of the text, the thirteenth-century hadith specialist and jurisprudent Imam Nawawi, was among the intellectual heirs of Imam Shafi ‘i, whose work he refined until his books became references even more frequently used in the school than the early works of the Imam himself.

But with their scholarly excellence, many of Nawawi’s books are lengthy and detailed, while for the purposes of the present volume, the translator sought a work whose small size would recommend itself to the needs of contemporary users. Also, upon examining the short works of Sacred Law that exist, the translator found that the original reason that many of them were authored in their brevity was as an aid to students memorizing them, rather than to give Muslims a basic guide to the rules of Islam.

The two aims are not necessarily the same thing. In previous centuries, students would come from their villages or neighbor­hoods to sheikhs, who would have them memorize a matn or short basic text of fiqh (jurisprudence), then teach the students what the condensed and often technical language of the particular

rulings implied, the conditions for applying them, their evidential bases from Qur’an and hadith, and so forth. In this way, students returning to their native places were able to give reliable answers based on qualified scholarship to most of the questions in Sacred Law they encountered (as the matns memorized \¥ere compre­hensive), and then go on to explain the details of them they had learned from their sheikhs.

Summarized form of book

With such educational interests in view, the first priority of a matn’ s author was often to state the content as briefly as possible to facilitate memorizing. The present work, al-Maqasid, is such a matn and reflects this need, and we find in it, for example, that Imam Nawawi has summarized the prayer (salat) in a few brief lists of integrals, conditions, and sunnas, to enable students who learn them to answer a wide range of questions on whether a particular prayer is valid.

By way of contrast, the pres­ent translation aims at teaching the prayer and other aspects of Islam to learners, and lists of elements do not suffice for this, but have to be supplemented with a fu1ler description, for readers who want to know how to pray step by step. The goal in render­ing the present work has thus been to provide an English trans­lation that combines the reliability of a famous fiqh matn with an explanative style that does not require a specialist to understand.

Some Points About the Book – al-Maqasid: Nawawi’s Manual of Islam

The basic text, Iman, Nawawi’s al-Maqasid: ma yajibu ma ‘rifa­tuhu min al din [The objectives: what is necessary to know of the religion] (9.60) below has been filled out with interlineal notes from parallel sections of Reliance of the Traveller: A Classic Manual of Islamic Sacred Law (9.51), a comprehensive textbook in Shafi ‘i jurisprudence published in English and Arabic, translated from Ahmad ibn Naqib al-Misri’s ‘Umdat al-safik (9.50). Reliance of the Traveller is particularly suited to explain al-Maqasid because it represents, as its author notes, the soundest positions of the Shafi ‘i school based on the recen­sions of Imam Nawawi and Imam Rafi ‘i, giving precedence to Nawawi because he is the foremost reference of the school.

In the texts below, commentary from Reliance of the Traveller is distinguished from the text of al-Maqasid by parentheses, and is introduced in the English by a capital letter R. Remarks by the translator are similarly parenthesized but introduced with a lowercase n. Other notes begin with the author’s name at the first of the quotation, and end with the source’s title, volume, page number, and reference number from the present volume’s bibliographical section 9; as in the preceding paragraph, where the reference number appears after each of the first three book titles.

The almaqasid and reliance of the traveler

The paragraphs of the text have been numbered to facilitate cross-reference, and titles and subtitles added by the translator. A small number of rulings have been omitted about matters deemed too rare to benefit most English-speaking Muslims (for example, zakat assessment on herds of camels). Within the rul­ings, columns of necessary conditions or integrals, meaning that all of them must be present for the 1uling to hold true, are ite1nized by letters: (a), (b), (c), and so on. An example is the conditions for the validity of the prayer, which 1nust all be met for the prayer to be valid. Columns of examples or instances of a ruling’s appli­cability are itemized by numbers: (1), (2), (3),” and so on, indi­cating that not all need exist, but any one of them suffices to apply the ruling, such as the things which invalidate fasting, the existence of any of which invalidates it.

AL-MAQASID: NAWAWI’S MANUAL OF ISLAM

Those who use the transliteration provided in the present vol­ume to pronounce the Arabic of dhikr and supplications n1ay also like to read or tape-record a native speaker reading the Arabic text indicated by the cross-reference number after each transliteration, directing the reader to section 10 at the end of the book.

Finally, a number of the notes of Reliance of the Traveller together with other essays by the translator have been appended to the end of the present volume to clarify certain points.

May Allah bless all who read this book with an increase of baraka and the love of Allah and His messenger (Allah bless him and give him peace) in this world and the next. Ameen.

The purpose Taking a Sheikh and a Path – al-Maqasid: Nawawi’s Manual of Islam

8.ro.d (Muhamn1ad al-Hashimi:) As for when the path is merely “for the blessing of it” and the sheikh lacks some of the conditions of a true guide, or when the disciple is seeking several different aims from it at once, or the disciple’s intention is contrary to the spiritual will of the sheikh, or the time required is unduly prolonged,

or he is separated from his sheikh by the latter’s death or the exigencies of the times and has not yet com­pleted his journey to Allah on the path or attained his goal from it-then it is obligatory for him to go and associate with someone who can complete his journey for him and convey him to what he seeks from the path, as it is not permissible for him to remain bound to the first sheikh his whole life if it is only to die in ignorance of his Lord, claiming that this is the purpose of the path. By no means is this the purpose.

The purpose of the path is to reach the goal, and a path that does not reach it is a means without an end. The path was made for travel on it with the intention of reaching one’s goal, not for remaining and residing in even if this leads to dying in ignorance of one’s Lord.

The meaning of a true disciple is one who forth- lightly submits himself to a living sheikh during the days of his journey to Allah Most High so that the sheikh may put him through the stages of the journey until he can say to him, “Here you are, and here is your Lord” (al-Hall al-sadid li ma astash­kalahu al-murid (9.21), 7).

Submitting to a living Sheikh

8.ro.e (n:) Muhammad al-Hashim.i’s above words about submitting oneself to a living sheikh refer to matters within the range of the permissible or recommended, not what contradicts the Sacred Law or beliefs of Islam, for no true sheikh would ever countenance such a contravention, let alone have a djsciple do so, a fact that furnishes the subject of the remaining entries of this section.

8.ro.f (Muhyiddin ibn al-‘Arabi:) When we see someone in this Community who claims to be able to guide others to Allah, but is remiss in but one rule of the Sacred Law-even if he manifests miracles that stagger the mind–asserting that his shortcoming is a special dispensation for him, we do not even turn to look at him, for such a person is not a sheikh, nor is he speaking the truth, for no one is entrusted with the secrets of Allah Most High save one in whom the ordinances of the Sacred Law are preserved (Jami’ karamat al-awliya’ (9.57), 1.3).

AL-MAQASID: NAWAWI’S MANUAL OF ISLAM

8.ro.g (al-‘Izz ibn ‘Abd al-Salam:) The Sacred Law is the scale upon which men are weighed and profit is distinguished from loss. He who weighs heavily on the scales of the Sacred Law is of the friends of Allah, among whom there is disparity of degree. And he who comes up short in the scales of the Sacred Law is of the people of ruin, among whom there is also disparity of degree.

If one sees someone who can fly though the air, walk on water, or inform one of the unseen, but who contravenes the Sacred Law by committing an unlawful act without an ex­tenuating circumstance that legally excuses it, or who neglects an obligatory act without lawful reason, one may know that such a person is a devil Allah has placed there as a temptation to the ignorant. Nor is it farfetched that such a person should be one of the means by which Allah chooses to lead men astray, for the

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